Cable TV billionaire John Malone’s Starz pay-TV network is forming an alliance with Lions Gate Entertainment, a possible prelude to a combination of the two companies.

Malone will obtain a 3.4 percent stake in Lions Gate, producer of the multibillion-dollar Hunger Games movies and “Mad Men” TV show, and join the studio’s board, according to a statement Wednesday. Lions Gate gets a 4.5 percent stake in Starz and 14.5 percent of the voting power.

The alliance gives Lions Gate a potential new outlet for its growing TV production business. Starz, in turn, can obtain fresh shows that help it compete with HBO and Showtime, the top premium pay-TV channels.

“It could be, at the very least, a deal where Lions Gate and Starz cooperate in the development of programing,” said Paul Sweeney, a media analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “A lot of investors see this as the first step of John Malone trying to control Lions Gate.”

Starz has looked for a potential tie-up since at least 2012, when Chairman Greg Maffei, who also serves as chief executive of Malone’s Liberty Media, said the network would be more valuable combined with a media company that operates other cable channels. Liberty Media spun off Starz two years ago.

Lions Gate, an investor in the Epix premium channel, similarly has been looking for a merger for some time. The company unsuccessfuly sought deal talks with Sony, and has held discussions with China’s Dalian Wanda Group, which controls the second-largest U.S. cinema chain.

“Any time investors see John Malone taking an equity stake in a company, the expectation is at some point Malone will want to own the company or merge it with one of his existing companies or somehow increase his control over that company,” Sweeney said.

Shares in Starz, based in Douglas County, rose 3.45 percent to $31.76. Lions Gate, run from Santa Monica, Calif., rose 9.2 percent to $32.42 after climbing
as much as 11 percent, the most in more than two years.

Starz, which has more than 50 million subscribers, offers a mix of films and original programming like “Outlander,” a drama based on a series of novels by Diana Gabaldon, and “The Chair,” a documentary series about a competition between directors attempting to make their first feature film.

Content producers and programmers have weighed a variety of deals to gain bargaining power against pay-TV providers, which also are consolidating. Comcast is awaiting regulatory approval to buy Time Warner Cable for $45.2 billion, and AT&T has agreed to acquire DirecTV.

Last year, Starz tried unsuccessfully to find a buyer for the company and was passed over by Lions Gate, as well as CBS, AMC Networks and 21st Century Fox because potential bidders thought the network was overvalued, people familiar with the matter said in December. In lieu of selling itself, Starz considered investments and partnerships with U.S.- based or European-based media companies, one of the people said.

The deal with Lions Gate — which has produced TV shows like the Netflix original series “Orange is the New Black,” and the broadcast series “Nashville” — may be the content partnership that Malone was looking for.

“Lions Gate has emerged as a leader in developing global content, and this transaction creates the potential for a number of strategic opportunities around the world with them,” Malone said in the statement.

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